Everyone knows social media is important. Today, using social media intelligently can be the difference between making it and breaking it as a landscaping pro. But where should you begin, and where are you going to see a return on your efforts? Right off the bat, here are 7 things to think about and incorporate into your social media strategy.

Determining Goals and Outcomes

It’s simple enough to get going posting things to various social platforms. What’s more difficult is coming up with a coherent strategy of what and why you are posting.

Consider the underlying goals of your social media strategy. Are you trying to grow your overall following? Is finding new customers and building connections with them the objective? Or is social media a place for you to provide service and communicate with existing clients? Settling on real goals and objectives will get you off to a great start with social media. It’s also one that many people tend to skip.

Content. Content. Content

Everybody will tell you that the secret to social is creating and sharing 'great content'. Ok, great. So what is 'great content', where does it come from, and how are you supposed to create a steady stream of it while also running a Landscaping business?

Unfortunately, there's no single correct answer. But there's an easy mental check you can perform to let you know if something qualifies as 'great content' for your specific audience.

Choose three clients you want to know about your landscaping services. Put yourself in each of their heads, and read the post you’ve just written. Are you happy you found that post? If yes, post it! If not, ask yourself why and rethink.

Design Your Posts for Sharing

The most shared and reposted content will be that which is genuine, valuable, and helpful to its readers. So plan your content with share-ability in mind, and search for content posted by others that you can share and comment on yourself.

Conversations Not Billboards

When it works, social media has a community feel to it, with consumers and producers posting back and forth in equal parts. The famous 80/20 rule says you should devote 80% of your posts to sharing content from relevant sources and influencers, and reserving just 20% for posting about your landscaping company. Don't be too self centered with your use of social. If you only post about yourself, you'll quickly run out of that 'great content' we talked about. Survey your followers. Collect feedback. Post valuable things from elsewhere. And don’t be afraid to sound like a human being.

Video Killed the Copywriter

On a more focused note, how does video play into all of this? Most businesses acknowledge that they would like to use more video. But the time, resources, and effort needed to produce quality video can be a serious blocker. That said, the importance of video cannot be overstated, and there are stats to prove it.

Social posts containing video receive nearly 50% more views than their non-video peers, according to a recent HubSpot article. And with the proliferation of new video-specific platforms like Vine, Vimeo, and of course, YouTube, video is becoming more and more shareable.

Stop Dividing Social from Your Website

In the past, there’s often been an unnecessary wall between social media and primary websites. Obviously, this makes very little sense. Insure that customers visiting your main website have an easy way to link out to your social channels. Forbes lists social links on their shortlist of social media musts. This is a no-brainer, and takes just a couple minutes with a social icons plugin like this.

Send Traffic from Social to your Site

In the same way that linking from your website to your social is a no-brainer, linking from your social back to your website is equally worthwhile. Most social media platforms will let you add links to your profile, or elsewhere.

But today, you can go even further, and embed your social media content right in your landscaping company’s website. All of the major social platforms have methods to embed a stream on a site. Some even let you combine posts from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other platforms into a single feed, like this!

How does social media play into your landscaping company and marketing strategy? We’d love to hear about tips, tools, and tricks you discovered, and see examples of what’s working for you. Tell us in the comments section, and maybe we'll share your content on our own social channels!